Renowned US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues we now live in a state of 'Present Shock' where we’ve lost our understanding of time; and where our sense of what the future should and could be has been seriously diminished. He explains the cause and symptoms of 'Present Shock'.

Transcript

Alvin Tofler video: My name is Alvin Tofler and I am a futurist. All of us think about the future but a futurist devotes more time to thinking about the long-term future, not just what's going to happen next. And we write books and we go around the world talking to people who are in fact making the future. So this is not some mystical exercise in Nostradamus style prediction but an attempt to find out who are the people that are changing or will be changing our lives in the years and decades ahead.

Antony Funnell: In 1970 Alvin Tofler became famous with his book Future Shock. It was a runaway bestseller, exploring the idea of how we as humans were coping with exponential technological change.

Well, more than 40 years on and leading US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has adapted that title for his latest book about our relationship with technology. His effort is called Present Shock, and he joined me a few days ago for this feature interview.

Douglas Rushkoff: I guess Present Shock is really just the human response to living in a world where everything happens now. And in some sense that's because of digital technologies which kind of live outside time and bring us everything in these sort of present tense bits or units. But it's also about graduating from the industrial age and all of the linear narratives of the last millennium into a world that is no longer really grounded by a past or a future or a sense of origins or goals. It's just in the present and we have to orient ourselves without those familiar linear guideposts.

Antony Funnell: You make the point that for the last century at least a lot of what we've done in society has been very much future focused, but that that has changed, as you say. Why has it changed? Is it just a change in the type of technology that we are using?

Douglas Rushkoff: No, I think it has changed for a few reasons. The millennial marker notwithstanding and I guess we can't underestimate what a number like 2000 would do to people, you know, with Y2K and the harmonic convergence and everything else that people were going nuts about, but it's also a sense that we've reached the limits of progress, that this journey that we've been on at least since the dawn of the industrial age, to expand into new territories and grow new markets and create more money and I guess get ever more efficient, has reached its limits.

There is no more world to conquer, there are no more territories to take, there is no real story to tell people that, oh, we're doing this for some great salvation or reason. There is no climax ahead. In some sense as a civilisation we've reached middle age and we are no longer looking forward to some future, we're kind of looking at the present to see, well, how can we sustain ourselves, how can we keep this planet alive, how can we do a little bit better with what we have. Because this notion of boundless frontiers and infinite progress just no longer really resonates as true for us any more.

Antony Funnell: And we're now living in this state of what you call presentism, but presentism doesn't necessarily mean living in the moment for the moment, does it, the way it has turned out.

Douglas Rushkoff: No, unfortunately not. You know, when digital technology came around I thought, well, here we go, here's an answer to that industrial age fatigue. Instead of trying to keep up and become the next generation of yuppies trying to squeeze more blood from this already withered stone, to mix a metaphor, we use digital technology…it seemed that we were going to be able to now work in our own time and in your underwear from your bedroom and trade directly with other people, create value, make games, that we wouldn't just have to get jobs and be 9-to-5 people really working on the clock literally, working by the hour instead of by the things we made.

But we ended up really using digital technologies to amplify the already obsolete agendas of the industrial age to figure out how to get people to work more, how to burrow ever further into time, and we ended up creating devices and platforms and software that really do rob us of time, that require us to be always on and responding to pings and answering email, monitoring our workers and monitoring our keystrokes.

So I feel like the great opportunity to really let digital technology take care of a whole lot of stuff and reclaim our time for ourselves, we ended up overly letting these technologies take our time from us. And that's the problem we are contending with.

Antony Funnell: And not just take our time from us but also to distract us, to prevent us from looking forward.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right, instead of seizing the new now, which I think would be the best option, not really looking ahead or back but really embracing the moment, we are disoriented, we're constantly responding to the insistent pings of our devices, chasing the moment they offer and forgetting that we are the ones in real time and the devices are chasing us.

Antony Funnell: It would be easy to blame the technology, wouldn't it, but you make very clear that it isn't the technology, that this is what we are doing to ourselves, we are doing this with the technology to ourselves.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right. I mean, certainly those of us who are aware of how these things work or may be more responsible than others. It's funny, I always look back at this one day in I guess it was in 1995 when Netscape went public and Jerry Garcia, the guitarist for the Grateful Dead died, and it was on the same day. And it seems to me that was the moment that we chose how we were going to use this stuff, that we were going to let the 1960s values about humanism and using our technology to really come together somehow, you know, we would dispense with those and instead use it to accelerate markets and to keep everybody very busy. And I guess that's really true.

I've never really worried so much about email or any communications technology as I have about the people on the other end. You know, it's not my inbox that's getting angry at me, it's the people who have sent emails with expectations that I'm going to answer them within the hour, which is unreasonable and it's their problem really, not my email programs.

Antony Funnell: Is there a sense in which we've tripped ourselves up in trying to mimic the efficiencies of the machines, of the technology which we've created?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yes, well, we always do that, that's our nature, but it's one thing to…if you're going to imitate the efficiency of machines then really what you're doing, you're imitating industrial age machines, your assembly line and the clock and all these things that can move faster. If you're really truly going to ride the biases of digital technology than what you would do is see that they are actually asynchronous, that they are not something that you speed up in order to catch up with. Digital technologies sit and wait, they're discrete, they're growing in steps.

The earliest computer communications that I ever engaged in was bulletin board services. They were asynchronous conversations where you would log into a computer and you would download a conversation in progress. You would log out, you would turn off your modem and you would read. You might read for hours this long conversation, and then you would decide how you were going to respond and you might take hours or overnight to craft your careful response to this conversation and then you would upload it. So online you were actually smarter than you were in real life because you gave yourself all the time that digital technology will afford you, and people were smarter there.

And now, who is smarter online than they are in real life? Nobody, because we're tweeting impulsively, trying to catch up with this stuff as if it were happening in real time rather than really exploiting this very step-by-step bias of the way these technologies actually work.

Antony Funnell: And you're listening to Future Tense—new ideas, new approaches, new technologies. I'm Antony Funnell, and our guest today for this feature interview is leading US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Program or Be Programmed. His latest book is called Present Shock.

Now, let's go back a bit to a reference Douglas Rushkoff made right at the beginning of the interview about our society abandoning the linear narrative as we've become caught in what he calls 'presentism', the embrace of the here and now. Let's get a better idea of what he meant by that.

Douglas Rushkoff: I mean, in some sense this is a good thing. I remember back when I was in theatre school and I was just sick to death of the Aristotelian narrative, you know, some heroic person goes on this journey and we follow them into danger and watch them make all these choices, then they either make it out at the end or they don't and they pull their eyes out or…it was just, like, oh my gosh, again and again and again this same shape. And that same shape has been used to motivate people for movements and 'ends justify the means' or 'eyes on the prize' campaigns to vanquish the enemy or get the new territory or win the day or seize the Bastille or whatever. So to some extent I feel like our release from those stories, the fact that we no longer have time for those stories to work out…you know, if you're living in the present, if you're in the moment that there is no before and after, there is no work towards a goal. If you've got remote controls and DVRs then you don't sit through a story in a linear fashion, particularly if you don't trust the storyteller, and you don't even expect a story to have an ending.

Here in the States everybody is watching Game of Thrones, and they are enjoying it more like a soap opera, you know, week to week to week. They are not watching it to see who's going to win. It's almost…hearing that the author of the books on which it's based, that he has an ending in sight is almost disappointing on a certain level because we'd left that. And yes, it's hard when you don't have a linear narrative, when you don't have those kind of goals and that sense of being on a proper journey, but on the other hand that's really what growing up is, both as an individual and as a society.

When you see the inklings of this in, say, the Occupy movement where they are having a movement without even stating demands and goals in that way, where they are just saying, well, we're just doing this thing now and we're not going to tell you how it ends, we don't see it as something that ends, we see it as something that keeps going. Or in the popular culture we see it in video games where a game is really a series of choices that the user makes, the player makes in real time, you know, this is a game that I'm playing and I'm making active choices as I go rather than sitting and watching some canned story about some other person.

Antony Funnell: And going back to the point you made earlier about our notion of the future. If you then lose contact with that idea of the linear narrative, you aren't necessarily going to be interested in the future, are you, in your own future or in your society's future.

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, not so much. In some ways I guess that's frightening; oh no, who's thinking about the future? I don't know how much thinking about the future has really gotten us to change the present. You know, we never do. We're not doing anything about global warming or any of these things, we're hoping that someone in the future is going to figure out a solution, you know, when you talk to most of the people who aren't worried about it or are dumping things. So I think the motivation for appropriate action has to come from the present. You're not going to use plastic because it's stupid, you're not going to make waste and destroy your environment because it's inappropriate now, not just in some future scenario.

Antony Funnell: I mean, we're really just at the beginning of the digital era, is it possible that the changes associated with what you call presentism, that they may be cyclical or that they may really just be a passing phase that we are going through with society?

Douglas Rushkoff: I suppose it's always possible, but I don't see futurism as particularly consonant really with digital technology. I understand history, say, as being very consonant with text. You know, we invented text, we wrote stuff down, and all of a sudden we can record things that happened in the past and we can create contracts about things that happen in the future. And the notion of progress was born and people started to write down laws, they wrote their story of the relationship with God as a covenant. So we saw all these things happened that were really very textural.

Then we get the mechanical age and the clock and all of a sudden people start selling their hours rather than their work. It's how we got labour. People invented a kind of money, central currency that has a clock built into it. This is money you lend out at interest and you have to pay it back, and then some, at a certain known time, and that set in motion really the clock of the industrial age, of European colonialism and the requirement of economic expansion.

And now we get digital technology and digital time which really seems to me fundamentally different, that it's a different kind of clock, it's a sequential clock, it's one where each moment yields another plateau, another choice. Every moment is a decision point, it's no longer some pie chart or some section of the day. And if we are moving from this linear temporal mode to now this very stop/start sequential choice after choice after choice mode, it really is like moving from linear narrative to something more like hypertext, from a smooth world to something that feels much more like stepping stones. And I do think that our social lives, our personal lives, our political lives, our economy, and even our spiritual lives are going to adjust to this very new temporal landscape.

Antony Funnell: Given that our digital technologies are so addictive and are so all-pervading in our daily lives, the change that you've outlined, that's quite a profound change for society, isn't it, and it's hard not to look ahead, at least from my perspective, and not be pessimistic then about the future.

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, the reason to be pessimistic, if you're going to be, is that we are putting billions of dollars and years of research into how to make our computers more addictive. The companies behind these devices are not charged with making the world better or making our relationships more fruitful, they are charged actually with making our relationships and everything else more dependent on digital technologies, and that requires for the most part dehumanising them and siloing us and selling us on one version or another of a digital interface over that of the human interface, so that we'd rather be sending email than having face-to-face contact or even a phone call. We'd rather be looking at our devices than the other people in the street or in the room or on the train.

And it's hard because people aren't really getting much better at smiling at each other but our interfaces are getting a whole lot better at activating the brain centres that used to be activated by a smile or a touch or somebody breathing in rhythm with you. So yes, there is cause to be concerned, but that's part of why I write a book like this, is to hopefully re-enchant people with real time, with other human beings, to help people understand that we're not in service of information, that information is in service of us, and that these technologies can still be used to give us more time, to allow us to schedule around our own rhythms rather than try to conform our rhythms to the pings of these technologies, because these technologies are not in real time anyway, they're asynchronous, outside time.

Antony Funnell: Going back to your previous book Program or be Programmed, I take it you would then say that the positive strategy to dealing with some of these negative problems associated with what you call presentism is to first realise it but to also take control of these issues, to take control of your own relationship with technology. Would that be correct?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yes. I mean, in some ways it's true the only way out is through, and I don't mean that we have to go to Monsanto for our seeds now if we want to feed everybody, but if we're going to live in a digital environment, we have to be the people programming it, because if we're not doing it the machines are going to do it or the people that are in the service of corporations, which are basically just programs themselves. And if we're not going to learn how to program, if we're not going to be literate in these spaces then we just have to at least understand the biases of these technologies, we have to be able to look at an interface, at a website, at a social network and understand what it's for. We have to be able to really sense is this thing serving me or is it not, is this thing representing me in a real way or is it misrepresenting me. That's why last month I left Facebook, and people are still horrified that I would do it, and certainly my publicists are horrified that I would do it two weeks before I release a book. But it seemed to me unconscionable to be arguing for people to really take charge of their online identities and invite them to be friending me on a service which actively misrepresenting them and hoping to put them into advertisements for things they may never have even heard about.

Antony Funnell: Douglas Rushkoff, thank you very much for joining us on the program.

Douglas Rushkoff: Oh gosh, thanks so much for having me, and good luck bringing people together with good old fashioned terrestrial radio.

Antony Funnell: Old fashioned indeed. His new book is called Present Shock.

Our other guest today was Ian Bogost, games developer and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. And he's also a well-known analyst and commentator on the relationship between humans and technology.

You may recall Professor Bogost featured in our recent show on MOOCs in tertiary education. Look for it on our website. And there's a link to his Atlantic article there as well, 'The End of the Hangup'.

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Comments (3)

Cass Murrie :

21 Apr 2013 6:40:54pm

It's difficult to lose your sense of time and lineality when you are planting, growing, hatching, feeding,harvesting etc. The slow rhythm of the earth is still there, even if some people are rushing and don't feel it.

Rose Farrell :

21 Apr 2013 9:00:25pm

I really enjoyed the interview with the author of a new book "Present Shock", Douglas Rushkoff. I read Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" in my 20s and am now in my 60s. So much of Douglas Rushkoff's interpretation of trends, leading up to today's high tech and social media "present", resonated with me. I found his thoughts so original. I hope this author's work will be instructive because our inevitable struggle to cope with enormous environmental challenges now demands new ways of thought.

G Hilbert :

27 Apr 2013 8:53:47am

There's considerable wisdom in what both Ian Bogost and Douglas Rushkoff have to say but I doubt whether many of the regular listeners to Future Tense would agree. Avid users of this communications technology (that's most of the population I'd reckon) would probably consider both of them Luddites for having the hide to question its use given its widespread acceptance and ubiquity.

Clearly, I can't address the multitude of issues here except to say that something is seriously wrong with the take up of this technology given that most of the world seems irrationally obsessed with it. No technology in history—not even the beloved motor vehicle—has seen such an addiction by so many.

I call the internet and the smart/mobile phone electronic heroin. It has to be when you see how irrational people have become: twice this year I've nearly killed people when they blindly walked out whilst texting onto a four lane highway in front of my vehicle. I've seen people scream down the corridors that the email is down then go home claiming they can't work rather than use the telephone or walk into the office next door—and that's just the beginning of an encyclopaedia of examples I could give.

You ask anyone—even old-timers—how did they manage before mobile phones or the internet and all they'll utter is gibberish (methinks because of the thought of withdrawal). Tell anyone we made it through the first 10,000 years of civilisation, organised and executed two world wars, designed the atom bomb, landed on the moon and created the most successful scientific endeavour of all time—quantum mechanics—all without the damn internet or mobile phone and all you'll get in response is a stunned-mullet stare!

The world's gone mad; you'd think everyone had become an obsessed electronic nerd. It seems to me that technology is advancing much faster than the world can put into perspective—we've still kid's thinking yet we're in possession of dangerous adult tools. Frankly, if there's not a reappraisal soon about how we use technology then I fear for society.

No, I'm far from being a Luddite. My profession is electronics and communications engineering. Over time, I've worked in broadcast and TV engineering, in scientific establishments and also I've been head of an IT department for years.